


Once Upon a Time (There Was A Doctor)

by starrkeys



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Cybermen - Freeform, Gen, Pre-Season/Series 01, Slice of Life, the doctor as john smith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 13:15:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5745238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starrkeys/pseuds/starrkeys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Smith lives a good, admittedly somewhat boring life. He works at a library and every Saturday he gets to tell the children stories about the heroic Doctor who endeavors to save everyone who needs him. He isn’t exactly content but a little bit of boredom is just what he needs after everything that’s happened to him. But when the monsters catch up with him, he has to decide whether he’s going to keep running away or meet it all head on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Upon a Time (There Was A Doctor)

“Once upon a time, there was a little boy who wanted to save everyone and make them feel better. So he became a doctor. The Doctor went traveling and he tried to save everyone he met and solve all the problems. No matter how hard he tried, there was always some kind of evil thing for him to fight. Sometimes he couldn’t save everyone. And it made him really, really sad because he wanted to save them all.

“One day, it all became a bit much for the Doctor. So he decided to take a holiday. He spent a whole year in Christmas. He sang Christmas carols and gave gifts to everyone who looked like they needed one. He took in the twinkly lights and the decorated Christmas trees and he met all sorts of happy, jolly people. Nobody at all needed his help, because Christmas is a magical time of year when not a single bad thing can happen.

“After a whole twelve months of Christmas, one of the evil things, a monster caught up with him and the Doctor came back from his holiday so he could save people once more. He realized that he couldn’t run away from his problems any longer.

“The Doctor went traveling once more.” John sat back from the edge of his chair, where he’d been seated for much of his story. Every time he told one of his Doctor stories, he became entirely enthralled by it and when he finished one, he always had to come out of a haze. All the children stared back up at him from the floor, their eyes as round as saucers. They were all silent.

Finally, one of the boys, a fellow with hair so blond it was almost white, spoke up. “I want Christmas for a year,” he said.

John chuckled. “Of course you do. Christmas is a perfectly wonderful time. But if you live in Christmas as long as the Doctor did, I think you’d find that it wasn’t anywhere near as exciting anymore. It wouldn’t be special anymore.”

“Oh.” The boy didn’t look at all happy about this realisation.

“Alright, children,” John exclaimed, standing up and clapping his hands together for attention. “That’s it for story time today. If you come back next week, you can hear about the time the Doctor faced a dragon.”

The children all perked up at the mention of a dragon and they scurried off into their waiting parents’ arms.

John cleaned up the story area slowly. He pushed his own chair off to the corner and straightened pillows and made sure that none of the kids had left garbage from their snacks behind. When that was all done, he decided to go through all the children’s books to ensure that they were in the right places and had their spine sticking out and that none of them were bent or left behind.

Libraries were generally quiet but this one was particularly dead inside immediately following the children’s story time on Saturday afternoons. After the parents and children went home, not many people were left still present. John liked these times the best. It was the perfect time to plan out his story for next week and he didn’t have to answer anybody’s questions or make conversation with anybody.

It was strange. Before he worked in the library, John loved conversation and meeting people. Nowadays, he only really enjoyed talking when it involved the adventures of the Doctor. Although he supposed, working in the library may have been the effect of not wanting conversation and not the other way around.

He got all the way to the ‘Z’ authors and left the section, confident that it was organized within an inch of its life. He headed back into the offices. The head librarian, a forty-something year old woman named Glory was at her computer working. She looked up when he came in.

“How was story time?” she asked, still typing away at whatever it was she was doing.

John shrugged and headed to his own desk in the corner. (Really, it wasn’t his desk, it was a desk shared by all of the part time employees but he was the only part time employee to work there for two years straight so it was his desk.) “Good. The children seemed happy with it.”

“What’d the Doctor do this time?” Everyone at the library was accustomed to John’s stories featuring the same main character.

“Oh he spent a year in Christmastime. It maybe wasn’t my best work. Wasn’t much action. I did try to work in a moral though. Maybe they managed to learn something.”

“No alien robots?”

“Not a single one to be seen. You get tired of action-filled wars sometimes. Sometimes you just need a break,” John said, rustling through the stacks of paper on his desk. At the beginning of every week, a to do list was made out for all of the part time employees to accomplish and one of the high school students, a boy named Landon was notoriously unorganized.

“Hmmph,” Glory said. “That why he spent so much time in Christmas?”

“Yes.”

“Seems a bit cowardly for your Doctor, doesn’t it? Isn’t that just an excuse for running away?” Glory asks, finally looking up from her computer. She pushed her glasses up her nose with one hand. John did not respond and she wasn’t really expecting an answer either. She was amused by his fascination with the Doctor but didn’t really care much one way or the other. As long as the children were kept busy for a little while every Saturday. “Anyway, the teen section needs reorganizing. We got a huge donation. The large print can get moved down.”

“Alright,” John said, giving up hope of finding the to-do list. A new one would come out on Monday anyway and usually he noticed if there was a job to be done. The stack of new books or cart full of returns was always a dead giveaway.

John spent the last couple hours of his shift working away alone. Then he went home to the little house he was renting at the edge of town. He’d learned his lesson the time he’d stayed with Susan in a junkyard. When you stay in one place for a long length of time, don’t stay in the TARDIS. Otherwise, he might’ve ended up taking other random humans gallivanting across the universe. At the same time, he didn’t want to stay in the TARDIS. It reminded him too much of everything that had happened and the whole point of staying on Earth and living as a human was to forget.

The point was to forget about the Time War and to forget about all the people he couldn’t save.

He was just sitting down with his feet up and a cup of tea in hand when he noticed. The psychic paper that he still carried around in his pocket had been written on. ‘Cybermen!!!’ was scrawled across it in a chicken scratch that was unmistakeably his own. Underneath that, there was a place and a date and time.

He scowled and shoved the paper away from himself under yesterday’s newspaper. He wasn’t going to come to his own rescue. A version of himself from another time would answer the call. It didn’t have to be him. There was no Doctor here.

John tried to finish his tea and put the psychic paper out of his mind. This proved impossible and he pulled the call for help back out. This time, the message was different. ‘Can’t keep running forever, Doctor. Remember Christmas?’

John scowled. He did not want to face off with Cybermen, he did not want to rescue whoever needed rescuing this time and he did not want to become the Doctor once again. He was rubbish at saving people, that much had been made clear to him. And he certainly didn’t appreciate how he knew himself too well and could bring back his past mistakes.

Yes, the situation now was a lot like when he’d spent a year of his life traveling to different Christmases in different times and places. But it was different. He was younger then and more optimistic. He couldn’t save everyone and there was no point in trying. There was no point in galumphing off in the TARDIS when he had no idea what he was running into. He’d probably end up in a bad situation and he’d have to regenerate and then he’d have to get used to a whole new version of himself. Nope, he certainly did not want to leave his comfortable life in his little house and his job at the library. The children were expecting a story about dragons next week, after all.

A needling voice in the back of his head reminded him that next week could come any time he liked. He did have a time machine. He could come back for the children someday. As much as all the stories of the Doctor were about helping people and doctoring, they were also about traveling. Through all of his regenerations, one of the few things that had stayed the same was his unquenchable desire to traipse through the universe and see knew things. He was positively itching with wanderlust.

He got up from his chair and put his tea aside. He sent a quick e-mail to Glory, telling her of how he had to leave town for a while as there was an emergency out of town that he had to attend to. Then he went to the spare room where he kept the TARDIS and he went inside. Holidays were nice and all but there was a thrill unlike any other that came with life threatening situations. It had been altogether too long since he’d last seen some Cybermen.

It was time for the Doctor to go traveling once more.


End file.
